This jumped out at me: "This economic system monetizes extinction itself. But at least you can rest assured that the destruction of the planet is supported by a well-educated, highly experienced and dedicated team here to assist you on every step of your extinction journey." I've been thinking a lot about western/capitalist priorities and requirements of "specialization" in various fields of study and "mastery" in my field of study, which happens to be classical music....and they're peas in a pod. They create a morass of unhealthy threads to untangle.....if one can even see them through the modernity programming. These priorities of specialization and disconnection are leaving us (humanity) unbelievably helpless and hapless in the face of collapse in a way that's singular throughout history. Thanks for another sharp and insightful piece - yours is an important voice to listen to.
It was this very notion that had me at a local farm this weekend to volunteer to help with the harvesting of their chickens....and I've been a vegetarian for much of my life. Thank you again for your clear-eyed, beautifully written, and hard-hitting pieces.
It all went pear shaped with the agricultural revolution. As hunter gatherers we had no need for property. Up until just a couple of centuries ago the Australian Aboriginal nations were living just fine - for over 50,000 years. It wasn’t utopia sure but they lived within their means, at one with nature, dependent on it and nurturing of it. In less than 200 years the “developed” civilisations came and wiped them/it all out. Now Australia is one of the highest per capita contributors to global pollution by exporting all of our fossil fuels and animal agriculture.
Great article you’ve written there George, couldn’t agree more. But where is this taking us (humanity) well we only need to listen to another George, George Carlin, and with a little help from “After Skool’s” graphics to appreciate that, taking this short extract, as a taster:
“We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic INTO A NEW PARADIGM: THE EARTH PLUS PLASTIC.”
So having created our own destiny we should get out and about, enjoy ourselves, laugh along with the world, and at ourselves, whilst we still can. And perhaps enjoy this short (8 minutes) cartoon animation adaptation of comedian George Carlin “After Skool's - George Carlin - The Planet Isn't Going Anywhere. WE ARE!"🤔
George Carlin was an amazing comic and an amazingly accurate prophet. George saw clearly - decades ago - a world out of balance and the miserable cretins that would destroy it. Everything he said in the 1970’s and 80’s is pertinent today. But, as usual, when he said it we buried our heads in the sand and laughed and laughed. He’s just a comedian, right? Well, we know now that he wasn’t joking…and no one with a survival instinct is laughing.
It's not in our nature to say "let's enjoy ourselves and to hell with the mess we've made". We are made to be that way with every little whim catered for if we can afford it to help us forget. We are made to be that way by the system which has divorced us from the land and meaningful occupation making things to sustain us. The system needs changing and as humans we are obliged to find it.
Hopium Kate pure hopium, as I’m afraid it is well within our nature to say “let’s enjoy ourselves and to hell with the mess we’ve made”. Don’t know about you but I’ve lost count of how many climate conferences, initiatives, summits and COP’s there have been since the 1970’s, with the emphasis on reducing CO2, meaning we (humanity) had to drastically reduce our use of FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils. We were led to believe transitioning to REbuildables, sorry, Renewable Energy sources, would result in being cheaper as greater use of their energy is directed towards transportation, and new tech methods in producing Steel, Concrete, Glass, Fertilisers etc, but nothing’s changed, in fact we’ve moved in the opposite direction, don’t believe me Kate, perhaps you’ve missed the recently published 74th edition (2024) of the Statistical Review of World Energy by The Energy Institute (EI), the summary headline “Renewables soar, but fossil fuels continue to rise as global electricity demand hits record levels” I’d add that reading the full report is worse than the summary’s headline. https://www.energyinst.org/exploring-energy/resources/news-centre/media-releases/renewables-soar,-but-fossil-fuels-continue-to-rise-as-global-electricity-demand-hits-record-levels . Is the Planet going to wait until we’ve finally seen the error of our ways, I think not, and as the saying goes "as ye sow, so shall ye reap"🤔
Excellent piece, wholly true. Genetically, we're pretty close to being chimps, and they live in gangs, and their Alpha males fight and kill each other over territory, and all chimps eat raw meat. We've pretty much blown our chance of evolving away from that into a cooperative and caring species because we've done our fighting and consuming on a global scale.
In school when we learned about the Renaissance, I really latched onto the term ‘Renaissance Man’. “That’s what I want to be.” A jack of all trades is what I’ve mustered. It’s been a journey I wouldn’t exchange for being only a master of one.
This is a great and true post. Certainly was my experience working. I read another post I think you may like on how companies sabotage themselves. It's so right on, and hilarious.
I have thought a lot about the issues you bring up in your articles, and again, thank you for writing them. I came to the conclusion several years ago that we are really living in unprecedented times where we don't have one seemingly unsolvable problem, a conundrum, but several of them. I've tried to explain it as a conundrum storm or a stack of conundrums, or a conundrum complex. Just to name a few: over population, the climate crisis driven by capitalism with a military spanning the globe ensuring the rush to extinction happens, nuclear weapons, self reinforcing feedback loops being triggered, species mass extinction and habitat loss, and the list goes on... Regardless, it really does feel like there isn't a real solution for any of them or a real way to get back on track since the common denominator is capitalism itself, and there is no guarantee that what comes after it would, if it were it to be dismantled, be any better. Do you think there is a way to untangle this web of the impossible? Or, do we start the process of humanity's hospice?
There is no “way” or “approach” per se as these are deeper issues having to do with human nature and consciousness itself. Better critical thinking and education are key but both of these have long ago been disabled and weaponised for profit. My books and interviews will give you clues…thanks ✌🏽
There is a disturbing truth here. We labor and strive our entire lives to be part of a gigantic treadmill where our very existence is of absolutely no consequence to the entities that profit and feed upon our unconscious servitude. Our reward is mountains of stuff to ease the dull ache of the pointlessness of this existence and keep us from thinking too hard about what we are actually doing even as we willingly give our children into the system that brings us ever closer, ever faster towards the breaking point.
Your dissection of the modern wage-slave's predicament in "Laboured to Extinction" unearths several dissonant truths. You paint a vivid, if somewhat overwrought, portrait of individuals whittled down to mere cogs, their aspirations and wholeness sacrificed on the altar of specialized labor and the insatiable maw of what you term the "economic monster."
I concur that the relentless drive for profit, detached from any genuine human or planetary well-being, has warped the nature of work into a grotesque parody. Many indeed toil in roles that contribute more to systemic rot and "Project Collapse," as you aptly put it, than to any discernible good. Your observation that even "ethical" professions are often ensnared within larger, destructive frameworks is a stark one. It is not without merit. The office drone as a "coordinator in destruction" is a particularly potent image.
However, while your diagnosis of the symptoms is often sharp, your implicit indictment of the entire system of enterprise as inherently necrocapitalistic, a "death cult," feels like a descent into a convenient nihilism. You identify the working human as a "zombie," a "consumatron." This characterization, while fitting for many who drift unthinkingly, risks absolving the individual of the grim necessity of sight and resistance. Are all truly bereft of agency, condemned to be mere automatons by the "system"? I think not.
The corporate culture you describe, one that rewards the hollow and the manipulative, is a cancer, yes. But to lay the entirety of civilization’s ills at the feet of "capitalism" as a monolithic evil, without distinguishing its perversions from its potential for genuine creation when unchained from statist and globalist machinations, is to aim with a blunderbuss when a scalpel is required.
You articulate the despair of the cage. You are less clear on whether any path exists beyond simply naming the bars.
Beyond organizing some kind of gigantic land trust org with an Americorp like network of cohousing communities, health and food coops and protective associations where people can live seasonal, nomadic lifestyles before or after losing everything due to noncompliance there isnt really a solution to the predicament.
This arrangement will allow some freedom but it will be immediately attacked by the machine especially the military intelligence apparatus. For self defense purposes and historical precedent consider the example of Common Ground NOLA who had an organized relief and recovery op as well as a 5-year Fed informant on its Board of Directors.
They told me to stay out of politics. The negative attention ramped up when I stopped organizing resistance to focus on resilience projects. Also they were aware of my travel history and associations which were used in entrapment and honey pot schemes.
Thank you George. I’m coming late to this one, but loving your writing. I feel an enormous sense of relief to read someone expressing the whole shebang. I’ve spent most of my adult life in what feels like a permanent state of WTF as to why, even at micro levels, we continue to make decisions and take actions that seem so isolated from wider causes and consequences, and imagine us to be hermetically sealed individuals. The separation, atomisation and domination pattern is so embedded in our consciousness (and therefore our systems and institutions) and we keep perpetuating it. I learned that those in power didn’t want to understand those dynamics, because it threw grit in the machine and stopped things “getting done”. (As long as “things” got done, then KPIs were met, and plans delivered—no consideration of whether those “things” were in fact the things that would lead (a)towards flourishing and (b) towards anything other than themselves). I worked in a university. And universities definitely do not want to look at their role in this dynamic. We are spectacularly ill-equipped (and disincentivised) to look at ourselves at all scales and dimensions, individually, culturally, organisationally, institutionally, nationally…And we are also spectacularly ill-equipped to engage with the relationality of everything—having vivisected the world. Super appreciate your ability to articulate these underlying patterns. I’m so over disaggregated descriptions of events through specialised lenses, and a myopic focus on individuals, rather than the conditions that gave rise to them. Thank you.
This jumped out at me: "This economic system monetizes extinction itself. But at least you can rest assured that the destruction of the planet is supported by a well-educated, highly experienced and dedicated team here to assist you on every step of your extinction journey." I've been thinking a lot about western/capitalist priorities and requirements of "specialization" in various fields of study and "mastery" in my field of study, which happens to be classical music....and they're peas in a pod. They create a morass of unhealthy threads to untangle.....if one can even see them through the modernity programming. These priorities of specialization and disconnection are leaving us (humanity) unbelievably helpless and hapless in the face of collapse in a way that's singular throughout history. Thanks for another sharp and insightful piece - yours is an important voice to listen to.
Thank you Rebecca. I think it’s a topic with little awareness even though it has left most of us highly vulnerable and mutilated
It was this very notion that had me at a local farm this weekend to volunteer to help with the harvesting of their chickens....and I've been a vegetarian for much of my life. Thank you again for your clear-eyed, beautifully written, and hard-hitting pieces.
Thank you!
It all went pear shaped with the agricultural revolution. As hunter gatherers we had no need for property. Up until just a couple of centuries ago the Australian Aboriginal nations were living just fine - for over 50,000 years. It wasn’t utopia sure but they lived within their means, at one with nature, dependent on it and nurturing of it. In less than 200 years the “developed” civilisations came and wiped them/it all out. Now Australia is one of the highest per capita contributors to global pollution by exporting all of our fossil fuels and animal agriculture.
Go figure.
💀100%
Our species is not only committing mass murder, it's also committing suicide. Humans are the dumbest species on the planet.
👏🏽👏🏽💀
Great article you’ve written there George, couldn’t agree more. But where is this taking us (humanity) well we only need to listen to another George, George Carlin, and with a little help from “After Skool’s” graphics to appreciate that, taking this short extract, as a taster:
“We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic INTO A NEW PARADIGM: THE EARTH PLUS PLASTIC.”
So having created our own destiny we should get out and about, enjoy ourselves, laugh along with the world, and at ourselves, whilst we still can. And perhaps enjoy this short (8 minutes) cartoon animation adaptation of comedian George Carlin “After Skool's - George Carlin - The Planet Isn't Going Anywhere. WE ARE!"🤔
A brilliant fellow-George! Thank you Barry ❤️
George Carlin was an amazing comic and an amazingly accurate prophet. George saw clearly - decades ago - a world out of balance and the miserable cretins that would destroy it. Everything he said in the 1970’s and 80’s is pertinent today. But, as usual, when he said it we buried our heads in the sand and laughed and laughed. He’s just a comedian, right? Well, we know now that he wasn’t joking…and no one with a survival instinct is laughing.
It's not in our nature to say "let's enjoy ourselves and to hell with the mess we've made". We are made to be that way with every little whim catered for if we can afford it to help us forget. We are made to be that way by the system which has divorced us from the land and meaningful occupation making things to sustain us. The system needs changing and as humans we are obliged to find it.
Hopium Kate pure hopium, as I’m afraid it is well within our nature to say “let’s enjoy ourselves and to hell with the mess we’ve made”. Don’t know about you but I’ve lost count of how many climate conferences, initiatives, summits and COP’s there have been since the 1970’s, with the emphasis on reducing CO2, meaning we (humanity) had to drastically reduce our use of FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils. We were led to believe transitioning to REbuildables, sorry, Renewable Energy sources, would result in being cheaper as greater use of their energy is directed towards transportation, and new tech methods in producing Steel, Concrete, Glass, Fertilisers etc, but nothing’s changed, in fact we’ve moved in the opposite direction, don’t believe me Kate, perhaps you’ve missed the recently published 74th edition (2024) of the Statistical Review of World Energy by The Energy Institute (EI), the summary headline “Renewables soar, but fossil fuels continue to rise as global electricity demand hits record levels” I’d add that reading the full report is worse than the summary’s headline. https://www.energyinst.org/exploring-energy/resources/news-centre/media-releases/renewables-soar,-but-fossil-fuels-continue-to-rise-as-global-electricity-demand-hits-record-levels . Is the Planet going to wait until we’ve finally seen the error of our ways, I think not, and as the saying goes "as ye sow, so shall ye reap"🤔
The falsehood of individual success (i.e, Marlboro Man) antithetical to comman survival
Step out of line, the man come and take you away.
Buffalo 🦬 Springfield.
For what’s it worth.
The Marlboro man…gets cancer in the end 💀 thanks
Excellent piece, wholly true. Genetically, we're pretty close to being chimps, and they live in gangs, and their Alpha males fight and kill each other over territory, and all chimps eat raw meat. We've pretty much blown our chance of evolving away from that into a cooperative and caring species because we've done our fighting and consuming on a global scale.
I can’t argue…thanks
In school when we learned about the Renaissance, I really latched onto the term ‘Renaissance Man’. “That’s what I want to be.” A jack of all trades is what I’ve mustered. It’s been a journey I wouldn’t exchange for being only a master of one.
My goal too! All my life I’ve been torn between science and art
Everything isn’t supposed to be this compartmentalized. It’s unnatural.
Yes!!
This is a great and true post. Certainly was my experience working. I read another post I think you may like on how companies sabotage themselves. It's so right on, and hilarious.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-162649547?source=queue
Thank you
I have thought a lot about the issues you bring up in your articles, and again, thank you for writing them. I came to the conclusion several years ago that we are really living in unprecedented times where we don't have one seemingly unsolvable problem, a conundrum, but several of them. I've tried to explain it as a conundrum storm or a stack of conundrums, or a conundrum complex. Just to name a few: over population, the climate crisis driven by capitalism with a military spanning the globe ensuring the rush to extinction happens, nuclear weapons, self reinforcing feedback loops being triggered, species mass extinction and habitat loss, and the list goes on... Regardless, it really does feel like there isn't a real solution for any of them or a real way to get back on track since the common denominator is capitalism itself, and there is no guarantee that what comes after it would, if it were it to be dismantled, be any better. Do you think there is a way to untangle this web of the impossible? Or, do we start the process of humanity's hospice?
There is no “way” or “approach” per se as these are deeper issues having to do with human nature and consciousness itself. Better critical thinking and education are key but both of these have long ago been disabled and weaponised for profit. My books and interviews will give you clues…thanks ✌🏽
It's just fucking stupid.
Humans have to internalise the lie that work is virtue because they'd rather not look at the fact that they are abused.
Think positive.
That's why they will never get the hump enough to really fuck things up.
#fuckwork
Thank you for stating the truth.
Thank you for reading it
it’s superb work, always is.
✌🏽💀
There is a disturbing truth here. We labor and strive our entire lives to be part of a gigantic treadmill where our very existence is of absolutely no consequence to the entities that profit and feed upon our unconscious servitude. Our reward is mountains of stuff to ease the dull ache of the pointlessness of this existence and keep us from thinking too hard about what we are actually doing even as we willingly give our children into the system that brings us ever closer, ever faster towards the breaking point.
Your dissection of the modern wage-slave's predicament in "Laboured to Extinction" unearths several dissonant truths. You paint a vivid, if somewhat overwrought, portrait of individuals whittled down to mere cogs, their aspirations and wholeness sacrificed on the altar of specialized labor and the insatiable maw of what you term the "economic monster."
I concur that the relentless drive for profit, detached from any genuine human or planetary well-being, has warped the nature of work into a grotesque parody. Many indeed toil in roles that contribute more to systemic rot and "Project Collapse," as you aptly put it, than to any discernible good. Your observation that even "ethical" professions are often ensnared within larger, destructive frameworks is a stark one. It is not without merit. The office drone as a "coordinator in destruction" is a particularly potent image.
However, while your diagnosis of the symptoms is often sharp, your implicit indictment of the entire system of enterprise as inherently necrocapitalistic, a "death cult," feels like a descent into a convenient nihilism. You identify the working human as a "zombie," a "consumatron." This characterization, while fitting for many who drift unthinkingly, risks absolving the individual of the grim necessity of sight and resistance. Are all truly bereft of agency, condemned to be mere automatons by the "system"? I think not.
The corporate culture you describe, one that rewards the hollow and the manipulative, is a cancer, yes. But to lay the entirety of civilization’s ills at the feet of "capitalism" as a monolithic evil, without distinguishing its perversions from its potential for genuine creation when unchained from statist and globalist machinations, is to aim with a blunderbuss when a scalpel is required.
You articulate the despair of the cage. You are less clear on whether any path exists beyond simply naming the bars.
Beyond organizing some kind of gigantic land trust org with an Americorp like network of cohousing communities, health and food coops and protective associations where people can live seasonal, nomadic lifestyles before or after losing everything due to noncompliance there isnt really a solution to the predicament.
This arrangement will allow some freedom but it will be immediately attacked by the machine especially the military intelligence apparatus. For self defense purposes and historical precedent consider the example of Common Ground NOLA who had an organized relief and recovery op as well as a 5-year Fed informant on its Board of Directors.
Yup, accurate..
They told me to stay out of politics. The negative attention ramped up when I stopped organizing resistance to focus on resilience projects. Also they were aware of my travel history and associations which were used in entrapment and honey pot schemes.
Thank you George. I’m coming late to this one, but loving your writing. I feel an enormous sense of relief to read someone expressing the whole shebang. I’ve spent most of my adult life in what feels like a permanent state of WTF as to why, even at micro levels, we continue to make decisions and take actions that seem so isolated from wider causes and consequences, and imagine us to be hermetically sealed individuals. The separation, atomisation and domination pattern is so embedded in our consciousness (and therefore our systems and institutions) and we keep perpetuating it. I learned that those in power didn’t want to understand those dynamics, because it threw grit in the machine and stopped things “getting done”. (As long as “things” got done, then KPIs were met, and plans delivered—no consideration of whether those “things” were in fact the things that would lead (a)towards flourishing and (b) towards anything other than themselves). I worked in a university. And universities definitely do not want to look at their role in this dynamic. We are spectacularly ill-equipped (and disincentivised) to look at ourselves at all scales and dimensions, individually, culturally, organisationally, institutionally, nationally…And we are also spectacularly ill-equipped to engage with the relationality of everything—having vivisected the world. Super appreciate your ability to articulate these underlying patterns. I’m so over disaggregated descriptions of events through specialised lenses, and a myopic focus on individuals, rather than the conditions that gave rise to them. Thank you.
What’s the answer/solution to this? The path forward?
Read my books / essays! I can’t write you an entire essay here :)